Platial.com“Platial enables anyone to find, create and use meaningful maps of Places that matter to them.” A kit for annotating Google Maps, basically. Handy if you haven’t already written your own scripts to do that.

I’ve finished a fairly major rewrite of my GMapToGPX utility, and I’m pretty happy with it. It’s now AJAX-y, although you wouldn’t know from using it. But it does make a page request to Google Maps in the background, instead of trying to parse the currently loaded page, which was a real pain in the ass.

These are the improvements I can remember:

Handles driving directions with multiple destinations. This was the big one that prompted the rewrite. It’ll produce a track with multiple track segments now, or multiple routes.

Shouldn’t break as often. Another big one. Instead of trying to extract information from data structures whose names change with each new version of Google Maps, I’m now extracting it using a method I think will be more stable.

It hides the Google Maps page before displaying. Previously, if there were enough driving directions to warrant a scroll bar, the scroll bar was visible on top of the GPX results. It didn’t cause functional problems, but I hated it. It works better now.

The “Full” option is back. You can once again get a GPX file containing track logs of the entire route(s), following the curve of the roads. I don’t recommend it for cross-country trips, since the file can get pretty big and slow the browser down while the GPX is created, but I don’t prevent you from using it any more.

Status messages are displayed in an overlaid <div> instead of as an alert() popup. I hated those popups.

There are still some things I’d like to clean up, but overall (considering that I’m not a programmer) I’m pleased with myself. I sure do hope that this version survives the next Google Maps update, because I have high hopes for the data extraction method I’ve switched to.

Hey, what’s that?A cool google maps application that lets you identify mountain peaks visible from your location. They sent me some code to make my gpx bookmarklet work with their site, which I’ve added.